PART |: HISTORIES AND THEORIES OF THE DIAGRAMS OF ARCHITECTURE Part I: Diagrams sf - aesceve “4 Ebenezer Howard, Garclen Cities of Tomorrow, 1902. Plan of a garden city schematic shagram showing functional and structural divisions of a garden city and its context Note the special zones provided for ‘waifs\ ‘inebriates’ and ‘epileptics a Ge MOTEUR HOMAIK 878. En s'élevant sur un plan inctiad (role § 52). on a0 ‘trouve dans les conditions mixtes de Ia marche sur excalier re 0, "Pn 50, — Marke var en pl ad, corps s¢ porte en arant pour résister A la composante tan eat né- ‘gentielle dela pesanteur. mutre, 16 "Bn devanant rerticale, In jambe antérieure clave le poids ‘ot sur terrain plat, La jambe antérieure 8 (f cossairement Uécble, de série que OCB’ = OB; et Movement figure from Jules Amar's Le moteur humam, 1914. (trans ‘The Human Motor. 1920) 46 The Diagrams of Architecture4T Part: Diagrams‘The monumental Steiger panels (1935), 161 to 19/ feet (5-8 metres) long and about 3 feet (| metre) or 30 high. are one of the grandest diagrammatic narratives of architecture and urbanism ever produced Prefiguring the grand diagrammatic narratives of Koolhaas in his EU projects and his books on shopping and China, this large exhibition installation format diagram includes many individual diagram types Influenced by CIAM IV and influential on Le Corbusier's CLAM Grid, it was designed in consultation with van Easteren, Hess and Neurath and served to visualise the influence of economic and production-technical factors on the design and planning of the city considered as a social andl political whole. This diagram masterpiece is radical in its encyclopaedic integration of many types of diagram. It links, for the first time in the history of architecture, critical relationships between labour, technology, architecture, product design, the working classes, and the local and global with an unprecedented range of historical. geographic and diagrammatic methods. See below for translations of the captions. © Netherlands Architecture Institute. leech eal ony Vette athe beds guarior rhsa te tancesmetopot commer saendng exymetopols verketusmittel means of transportation , “ wack ant ausnutaing der geographic graphic factors Preduktionsiverse: means of production of manufactunnc/melhcds of praciuetion/mannfacturing fe zeit hollow or concave tent (tor whatever reason) Bort village dort mit burey village with castle burg ~ cate berg = mountain tact mul burgen eny wrth castles nit stadt gilbieratt city monastery vilagey vilage wath monastery 4B The Diagrams of Architecture49 Part: DiagramsCr Peat peur ‘oyoa303-0 24 np sa ayes e799 SengtsTosdoais saad YNOWY.7 30 SNOISS¥d $37 UNS SUNodSiO | {es Passions de amour, 1957. © Collection FRAC Cemre, Onléans. Photo Phipps Magnon From the book published by Editions Le Bauhaus Imaginiste Copenhagen, Permild & Rosengren. Pentes psychogéographiciues de la derive et localisation dunités d'ambiance. Dessin, Dépliant. 59.5 x 73.5 cm (23. x 28. in) 80 The Diagrams of ArchitectureSmithsons, grid for the CLAM Aix in Provence 1952-3, Collage, photographs, ink on paper, glued paper. AM 1993-1-688. Introduced by Le Corbusier in 1947, the CIAM grid included rune categories of analysis: the columns’ detailed milieu, use/programme, envelope volume, equipmenviechnology, ethics and aesthetics, socioeconomic factors, laws and regulations, finances anc construction phesing, The rows ofthis grid by the Smithsons correlated with the main CIAM themes of living. work, development of mind and body and circulation/movement ‘The grid was a formal research method that explored what the Smithsons referred to as ‘active socio-plastics’. © Smithson Family Collection, Paris, Musée national d'art moderne ~ Centre Georges Pompidou, Photo © CNACIMNAM, Dist. RMNi@ Georges Meguerditchian Frei Oto, numbered diagram for the cutting pattern of the membrane for the tensile German Pavilion at the Montreal Universal Expo 1965-7, © ILEK Universitat Stanger, Germany, 51 Part: DiagramsFumihiko Maki, Dojima Development Project, Tokyo Bay. 1864. Circulation, diagrams showing the relationship of people. objecis and facilities Reproduced by permission of Mali and Associates. © Fumihiko Maki Louis Kahn, Tyatlic Study, project, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1952 Plan of proposed traffic-movement pattem. Ink. graphite, and cut-and-pasted papers on paper, 622 x 108.6.cm (24 x 42 /. in), Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York © 2008, Digital image The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence 52 The Diagrams of ArchitectureKenzo Tange, Tange Associates, A Plan for Tokyo, 1960. The first Metabolist urban masterplar ign for an infinitely extendable, multipliable and expandable megastructures for Tokyo necessitated a diagrammatic approach that manages @ s equilibrium between variability and organisation. Influenced by diagrams from technical, biological and computer systems diagrams and theories, this work went on to influence later diagram architects like MVRDV. Reproduced by permission of Tange Olfice © Takako Tat eries af Se wan orme euneme OR Robert Ventun, ‘The Long Island Duckling’, This duck-shaped farm siand ne subject of Venturi's lhistration for his thesis about ¢ building being dominated by its symbolic form, which he contr nthe ated shed! © Courtesy Ventan, Scott Brown and Assc 53. Part i: DiagramsDiagrams of Diagrams Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation Anthony Vidler In this extensive survey, Professor Antony Vidler (Dean of the Cooper Union School of Architecture, New York) analyses the history of the 20th- century architectural diagram and its role in the modern representation of architecture. His analysis explores the diagram's seeming ubiquity across almost all ‘approaches and styles’ of contemporary architecture. In a historical analysis from Victor Hugo in the 19th century up to the present, Vidler charts the shifting fortunes of abstraction, reduction and geometrical simplicity, some of the key qualities of the architectural diagram. Focusing on these categories, properties and effects of the diagram, he details some of the critiques raised against these modernising tendencies and qualities, including the charges that these were sterile, inhuman, degrading and alienating. Vidler describes how these same critiques are still being used against today's Conversely, jiagram architectures. he shows how the same arguments about newness, purity, universality, essentialism and objectivity from diagrammatic architects today was present in the rhetoric of architects from previous centuries. Vidler’s account argues that architects have, in successive historical waves, Positioned themselves at various points in the history of architectural avant-gardes by privileging abstraction, reduction, purity and simplicity of geometry. Using various examples from neoclassicism to Modernism, he shows how each successive wave towards a universalising, essentialising and objectivising of architecture led to an ever-increasing and diagrammatic terseness, succinctness and economy of design, ultimately resulting in the dematerialising transparency of design and building in Modernist and contemporary architecture. One of the very few texts to significantly theorise the diagram in architecture before and in the 19th Century, Vidler’s lineage of the diagram also moves through Ledoux, Durand, Le Corbusier and Wittkower, to include Rowe, Koolhaas, Lynn, MVRDV and Eisenman. Neither a map nor a model of an existing geography, this environment is a virtual model of data as if it were geography, inserted into the morphologically transformed structures of cities and regions. Its architects refer to topologies and topographies and Prefer to identify what they do as mapping rather than drawing’ ... they track movement and event in space like choreographers. Their projects and buildings share an ironic sensibility that prefers the arbitrary rigour of an imposed and consciously subverted system to any emotive expressionism. Their drawings are cool and hardline, black-and- 54 The Diagrams of Architecturewhite diagrams of functional forms” ... Their drawings are thin traceries of wire-frame construction, digital or not, that affirm process rather than product and refer to various traditions of the avant-garde, whether Constructivist, Dadaist, or Surrealist ... Such imaginary objects, composite portraits of contemporary architectural projects, exemplify only a few of the design tendencies that have superseded what in the last decades of the 20th century was called Postmodernism. In place of a nostalgic return to historical precedents, often couched in ‘Renaissance humanist’ thetoric, these new ‘blobs’, “topographies’ and ‘late modernisms’ find their polemical stance in a resolutely forward- looking approach and their modes of design and representation in digital technologies. Radically different in their forms and aims, they nevertheless find common cause in their espousal of the one representational technique that they share with their Modernist avant-garde antecedents: their affection for what they and their critics call the ‘diagram’ This tendency is exhibited on every level of meaning associated with the term diagrammatic, and runs the gamut of a wide range of approaches and styles that at first glance seem entirely disparate - from diagrammatic caricature to theoretical discourse, Modernist revival to digital experiment ... Supporting this revival of diagrams, an entire theoretical discourse has been developed around the genre, following the coining of the term diagram architecture by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito in 1996 to characterise what he saw as a new sensibility in the work of his compatriot Kajuyo Sejima® ... In this ascription, architecture itself becomes joined to its diagram - a diagram of spatial function transformed transparently into built spatial function with hardly a hiccup ... Sejima herself has developed the genre into a design method of distinct clarity, where simple black-and- white diagrams of function and space are translated elegantly into building in a minimal aesthetic that goes well beyond the merely functional, in a way that has led some critics to see echoes of Japanese mysticism in the intensity of her material abstractions. From a less transcendental, and more neo-Structuralist position, Peter Eisenman, whose elegant linear projections of complicated cubic constructions, generated from a combination of historical analysis of Modernism and a study of syntactical visual language that derived from his reading of structural linguistics, became the paradigm of what the 1970s termed ‘paper architecture’, now finds a new intellectual receptivity for his diagrammatic drawings. His recently published Diagram Diaries at once reframes his life's work under a term whose revived legitimacy offers a means of inventing a pedigree for his digital experiments in morphological projection.® These projects and many more Continue the late-modern critical and ironic investigation of the Modernist legacy of the last 20 years, while using the diagram as a device to both recall and supersede its formal canons ... The diagrammatic turn in architecture, on another level, has been quickly assimilated into design practices that work with digital techniques of representation .. Despite the resistance of many architects, who mourn the passing of the oft-claimed relations between eye and hand, the evident speed with which digitised images of traditional modes of representation (perspective axonometric, plan and so on) can be modified and worked with has for many years supported the introduction of so-called 85 Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representationcomputer-aided design into practice.° But more significant still, what has clearly emerged in recent buildings and projects is an architecture itself not simply aided, but generated, by digital means, whether through animation, morphing or three-dimensional scanning and milling, in a way that would have been formally and technologically impossible hitherto ... In projects like these, the translation of geometry into building is the more direct as a result of the intimate relations between digital representation and industrial production, so that, for example, all traditional ideas of standardisation can be jettisoned bya cutting or milling factory that runs automatically from the designers program, as was the case with the titanium panels, all of different dimensions, that surface the vaults of Bilbao. The digital effect of these schemes is further reinforced by the use of materials with smooth reflective or translucent surfaces and of complex structures before only imagined in Expressionist or Constructivist utopias.” Architectural drawing has always been, as Walter Benjamin remarked, a ‘marginal case’ with respect to the major arts.® In the sense that it precedes the building, that it is Produced without reference to an already constituted object in the world, it has never conformed to traditional formulations of ‘imitation’, In the sense that it is a drawing towards the work of art itself, it is inevitably regarded as a supplement, part of the evolutionary narrative of a building's production, but not to be valued as art per se. As a late Robin Evans noted, this is ‘the peculiar disadvantage under which architects labour; never working directly with the object of their thought, always working at it through some intervening medium, almost always the drawing, while painters and sculptors, who might spend some time working on preliminary sketches and maquettes, all ended up working on the thing itself’? Yet itis true, as Evans also pointed out, that the architect's drawi 9, a5 Opposed to the painter's and the sculptor's, is generally the only work actually touched by the architect’s hand. This paradoxical separation between the artist and the work, the foundation of much architectural theory concerned with fepresentation, was the occasion for Benjamin’s remark that architectural drawings could ot be said to ‘re-produce architecture’. Rather, he observed, ‘They produce it in the first place’ (‘Study of Art’, p 89). Architectural drawing is also seriously ‘technical’ in nature, representing its objects with geometrical Projections, plans and sections that demand a certain expertise of the viewer, one trained to imagine the characteristics and qualities of the spaces represented by these enigmatic lines, as well as interpret them in theit context of a long tradition of spatial culture, cued to their often sly and concealed references to former architectural precedents . The architect works in code, code that is teadily understood by others in the trade, but is as potentially hermetic to the outsider as a musical score or a mathematical formula. These encodings of representation have, throughout the modern period, suffered from a second level of difficulty. At a time when architecture was tied to the classical conventions, or iater to the historical styles, the amateur might easily 86 The Diagrams of Architectureenough recognise the period or genre, identify the cultural reference and comprehend the implied commentary. Modern architectural drawings however, depict a more or less abstract object, assembled out of geometrical forms, with few recognisable building elements such as columns or decorative motifs. Abstractions of abstractions, they have increasingly over the last two centuries become little more than ciphers understood only by the professional circle around the architect, meaningless to client and layperson alike. Le Corbusier’s schematic evocations of infinite space, his evocation of a building’s principal elements in a few quick lines; Mies van der Rohe’s perspectives, often signalled by the thinnest of pencil lines situating a plane hovering in universal, gridded, space; such drawings suspended somewhere between a design process and a diagram carry little weight as popular representations. This apparent identity of the Modernist drawing and its object, both informed by a geometrical linearity that tends toward the diagrammatic, has, throughout the modern period, led to charges that the one is the result of the other, that architecture has too slavishly followed the conventions of its own representation. Modern architecture, concemed to represent space and form abstractly, avoiding the decorative and constructional codes of historical architectures, is thus accused of reductivism, of geometrical sterility, and thence of alienation from the human. This has been true since Victor Hugo first launched the attack in the first era of architecture’s mechanisation, and the issue has periodically resurfaced over the last century to be reframed most succinctly in Henri Lefebvre’s critique of Modernism’s ‘abstract space’"’ ... In both cases, the complaint had as much to do with architecture's chosen means of representation as with the built structures themselves ... Both Hugo and Lefebvre ground their indictments on what they consider the root cause of the ‘fall’ of architecture: representation, or more specifically, the too easy translation of the new graphic techniques used by the modern architect into built form. Architecture, that is, looked too much like the geometry with which it was designed and depicted. Geometry is thus seen as the underlying cause of architectural alienation, the degradation of humanism and the split between architecture and its ‘public’. And if for Hugo architecture had become no more than the caricature of geometry, for Lefebvre architectural blueprints, and more generally the architect's fetishisation of graphic representations as the ‘real’, sterilised and degraded lived space. For Lefebvre, the discourse of the graphic image ‘too easily becomes ~ as in the case of Le Corbusier - a moral discourse on straight lines, on right angles and straightness in general, combining a figurative appeal to nature (water, air, sunshine) with the worst kind of abstraction (plane geometry, modules, etc)? Such criticisms have been commonplace throughout the life of Modernism. “Diagrammatic architecture’ has been a term more of abuse than praise, signifying an object without depth, cultural or physical, one subjected to the supposed tyranny of geometry and economy - the commonplace of the ‘Modemist box’ caricatured by Postmodernists. As early as 1934, at the height of Modernist functionalism, the art 87 Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representationhistorian and friend of Le Corbusier Henri Focillon was warning that ‘in considering form as the graph of an activity ... we are exposed to two dangers. The first is that of stripping it bare, of reducing it to a mere contour or diagram. .. . The second danger is that of separating the graph from the activity and of considering the latter by itself alone. Although an earthquake exists independently of the seismograph, and barometric variations exist without any relation to the indicating needle, a work of art exists only insofar as it is form’"> ... In this context, the diagram was to be avoided, a mechanical trap. Despite such criticisms, the diagram has held a privileged place in the development of modern architecture as at once responding to the aesthetics of Rationalism and the authority of Functionalism. Beginning in the late 18th century, and in tune with the geometrical predilections of the scientific Enlightenment, a few architects began to turn away from the elaborate renderings, common to the late 18th-century academy and its heir, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Ledoux, trained as an engraver and inspired by the plates of Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie, developed a geometrical style of representation that informed his built work. The architect Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, appointed to the newly established Ecole Polytechnique after 1795 and responding to the demands of its new director, Gaspard Monge, developed a method for representation - a code of points, lines and planes to be organised on the newly introduced graph paper — that in his terms corresponded to the stereotomy and metric standardisation of Monge and the requirements of simplicity and economy"*... for Durand, drawing was also a way of constructing what the philosophers had attempted to invent for centuries — a kind of universal characteristic ... Durand’s diagrammatic method, economic of time and resources and readily communicable to the client, the engineer and the contractor, was widely adopted in the 19th century, although it did not, as its inventor had hoped, succeed in displacing the more elaborate renderings of the Beaux-Arts. Modernists at the end of the century, however, were quick to seize on its potential for conveying abstraction i function, among them Le Corbusier, who seized on the axonometric projections of beara Structures published by the engineer Auguste Choisy in 1899, reprinting them in is articles on architecture for L'esprit nouveau between 1920 and 1923."° Inheriting this double ideal, of a graphic representation that is itself a tool for the installation of the utopia it outlines, a geometrically driven Modernism developed a special affection for the utopian diagram. Ledoux’s claims for the circle and the square as the ‘letters’ of the architect’s ‘alphabet’ echoed Enlightenment projects for the development of a universal language, and his Ideal City of Chaux demonstrated the use of such geometry as a pictogrammatic language of three-dimensional form ... Le Corbusier, with an architectural sensibility informed by post-Cubist developments in painting and sculpture, psychology and philosophy, found in ‘abstraction’ a weapon against the historical styles and a powerful support for an architecture based on form (and its qualities of mass and surface) and space (and its qualities of enclosure or 88 The Diagrams of Architectureinfiniteness). In this sense, abstraction was registered as a primary aesthetic quality, one that allowed for the proportional systems and historical styles formerly making up the aesthetic content of the ‘art’ of architecture to be superseded by its own constructive and space-enclosing elements expressed in the pure geometries now coincident with the technological potential of steel and reinforced concrete. ‘Architecture has nothing to do with the “styles”,’ wrote Le Corbusier in 1923. ‘It appeals to the highest faculties by its very abstraction. Architectural abstraction is both specific and magnificent in a way that, rooted in brute fact, it spiritualises it. The brute fact is subject to the idea only through the order that is projected upon it (figure 1):"° The neo-Platonic echoes of this form of abstraction were clear, and Le Corbusier openly claimed continuity from earlier classicisms ~ from the formal and spatial order of the Greeks, the institutional and typological order of the Romans, and the proportional systems of the modern French classicists of the 16th and 17th centuries. The representational modes for this kind of abstraction were likewise derived from the linear obsessions of neoclassicists ... Thus Le Corbusier's characterisation of the architectural drawing echoes all the commonplaces of ‘contour’ theory after Johann Joachim Winckelmann: ‘A good and noble architecture is expressed ‘on paper by a diagram [une épure] so denuded that an insider's vision is needed to understand it; this paper is an act of faith by the architect who knows what he is going to do’ ... The diagrammatic representations of such an abstraction were in this sense close replications of a ‘new world of space’, as Le Corbusier called it, that was to dissolve all traditional monumentalisms, styles, institutions and habitats in the universal flux of the abstract. Transparency, infinity, ineffability, liminality and the expansive extensions of the post-Nietzschean subject demanded as few boundary conditions as possible; the thinner the line, the more invisible the wall. Succinct and economical, the architect's “épure’ reduced a project to its essentials; it described the fundamental organisation of a building tersely and in terms that seemed to correspond to the scientific tenor of the times; it was, in some sense, the essence of the project, at once a correct and analytic representation of relations and a formal analogue to the built structure itself. SRR OAL A\™ FEL Gag wes apa te dees Grea hegee : FF pda Le Corbusier 1925 Diagram of nes and forms as they affect the physiology of sensations © FLC/ADAGP. Paris and DACS. London 2008. 89 Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern RepresentationLe Corbusier’s moral stance in favour of the abstract drawing had its roots in the late Enlightenment, and his attitude towards drawing was remarkably similar to that of Durand. ‘Drawings’, he argued late in 1939, ‘are made within four walls, with docile implements; their lines impose forms which can be one of two types: the simple statement of an architectural idea ordering space and prescribing the right materials - an art form issuing from the directing brain, imagination made concrete and evolving before the delighted eyes of the architect, skilful, exact, inspired; or alternatively we can be faced with merely a dazzling spread of engravings, illuminated manuscripts or chromos, crafty stage designs to bedazzle and distract - as much their author as the onlooker - from the real issues concerned.’ Architectural drawings were thus divided into two species: those that reveal the underlying structure and organisation of the project and those that dissimulate in order to seduce the lay client. This contrast between the analytical and the sentimental, the rational and the deceptive ... was more than a formal distinction of representation, however; it was a touchstone by which to verify the authentic modernity of an architectural work, one that discarded the ‘illusion of plans’ in favour of a design that represented its own ‘idea’. The drawing - a ‘simple statement of an architectural idea ordering space and prescribing the right materials’ — would thereby serve as an instrument of correction and production for an architecture that, as far as possible in the translation from design to building, would represent itself transparently, so to speak, materialising its aesthetic and intellectual order as clearly asa mathematical formula. Vv Modernist diagrams have not, however, been received without their own diagrammatic transformation at the hands of followers, epigones and revivalists. Le Corbusier's rapid sketches, diagrammatic as they were, were redolent of spatial and aesthetic potential compared with those prepared by the following generation, either in drawn or built form. Thus the polemical and geometrically closed diagrams of Albert Frey, in their attempt to clarify the principles of Modern Movement environmental ideals, rigidly codify both technology and space ... Other followers of the first generation of Modemnists built diagrammatic buildings to exemplify Modernist principles - among the best known would be Philip Johnson's quasi-Miesian Glass House in Connecticut of 1949 ... and Harry Seidlers post-Marcel Breuer house for his mother, of the same year in Sydney ... Such diagrams, widely repeated in the 1950s, were essential in the gradual transformation of Modernism from its status as a style for the cultural elite, or a minimal response to mass housing needs, to a generalised way of life for middle-class suburbs. Architectural historians, as they have sought to reduce the complexity of architectural experience to formal order, have also played a role in the diagramming of space and structure, starting early enough with Paul Frankl and AE Brinckmann between 1914 and 1924.” Their schematic renderings of historical space prepared the way for a host of similar spatial analyses heavily informed by Gestalt psychology. Perhaps the most 60 The Diagrams of Architecturecelebrated, and in the realm of architectural practice the most influential, was the page of systematised diagrams of Palladian villas published by Rudolf Wittkower in 1949."*The Wittkower diagram resonated with a post-war generation of Modemists looking for a geometrical and stable authority for form in the demonstrated absence of any single functional determinants. Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, among others, were drawn by the idea of the existence of what might have been ‘architectural principles in the age of humanism’ to develop a new and rigorous geometrical Modernism.’ «In the same year Colin Rowe, a former pupil of Wittkower, published a seminal essay on Le Corbusier, “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa’ ... Rowe's versions of the diagrams of Le Corbusier's villas at Poissy and Garches have themselves become the canonical references for late-Modernist space, referred to by architects as diverse as Rem Koolhaas, in, for example, his own mutation of the 20th-century villa in the recently completed house at Bordeaux, and Greg Lynn, in his appeal for (digital) geometry to be restored to its primary place in the generation of architecture. The recent attention to diagrammatic form in architecture may then be seen, on one level, as a testimony to the resilience of Modernist ideologies, aesthetics and technologies among those architects who had never thoroughly embraced the return to the past championed by neohistoricists and new urbanists. Thus, continuing Modernists celebrate the diagram, in what one can only call a neo-Modernist return by many architects to Rationalist simplicity and Minimalist lucidity. Here the appeal to the diagram is both polemical and strategic. In its reduced and minimal form it dries out, so to speak, the representational excesses of Postmodernism, the citational hysteria of nostalgia and the vain attempts to cover over the inevitable effects of modern technologies, effects that Modernists had attempted to face with the invention of abstract aesthetics. In its assertion of geometry as the basis for architecture, it opens the way for a thorough digitalisation of the field ... More fundamentally, the intersection of diagram and materiality impelled by digitalisation upsets the semiotic distinctions drawn by Charles Sanders Peirce as the diagram becomes less and less an icon and more and more a blueprint - or, alternatively, the icon increasingly takes on the characteristics of an object in the world. The clearest example of this shift would be the generation of digital topographies that include in their modelling ‘data’ that would normally be separately diagrammed — the flows of traffic, changes in climate, orientation, existing settlement, demographic trends and the like. Formerly these would be considered by the designer as ‘influences’ to be taken into account while preparing a ‘solution’ to the varied problems they posed. Now, however, they can be mapped synthetically as direct topographical information, weighted according to their hierarchical importance, literally transforming the shape of the ground The resulting ‘map’, however hybrid in conception, is now less an icon to be read as standing in for a real territory than a plan for the reconstitution of its topographical form. 61 Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation..- In this context, the question of architectural abstraction, whether in representation or in building, takes on an entirely new significance. For what seems to be at stake is the instability provoked between the new formal vocabularies generated by the computer and their easy translation into built form, so as to produce, almost simultaneously, an image as architecture and architecture as image. That is, where traditionally in clas: and Modernist works the architecture might image an idea, be imaged itself or produce an image of its own but at the same time take its place in the world as experienced and lived structure and space, now the image participates in the architecture to an unheralded degree, a condition that calls for, if not a post-digital reaction, certainly a re- evaluation of the nature and role of abstract representation in the production of (abstract) architecture. For the question raised by the new digital diagrams is whether they are in fact abstract at all, at least in the sense of the word used by Modernist aesthetics. Where Corbusian and Miesian diagrams held within them the potential of form to be realised as abstract spatial relations - abstractions of abstractions, so to speak — the digital drawing is nothing more nor less than the mapping of three- or four- dimensional relations in two, more like an engineering specification than an abstraction. ‘The aesthetics of digitalisation, moreover, seem driven less by a polemical belief in the virtues of an abstract representation of a new world, than by the limits of software’s replication of surface, colour and texture and its notorious aversion to any ambiguity: the Potential openness of the sketch, of the drawn line in all its subtleties, is reduced to thin- line clarity and all-over surface pattern. It would seem, then, that a new approach to aesthetics must be forged in the face of such drawing, one that would take into account the changing definitions of the ‘real’, the ‘image’ and the ‘object’ as it is subjected to the infinite Morphings and distortions of animation. An aesthetics of data, of mapped information, would in these terms differentiate itself from the diagrammatic functionalism of the Modern Movement as well as from the long-lived neo-Kantianism that has served Modemism’s aesthetic judgements since the Enlightenment. Modernism in these terms has shifted from a diagram that is rendered as an abstraction of an abstraction to one that is a diagram of a diagram. oa Notes See MVRDV, Metacity/Datatown (Rotterdam). 1999. [am referring to recent projects by Rem Koolhaas (The House at Bordeaux, 1999; the entry for the “ompetition for the French National Library, 1989) and by Zaha Hadid Toyo Ilo, Diagram Architecture’, El Croquis, vol 77 no 1, 1996, pp 18-24 See. for example, Pier Luigi Nicolin, ‘The Tao of Sejima’. Lotus. no 96. 1998, pp 7-9. Nicolin takes issue with Iio's interpretation of Sejima’s translucent and transparent ‘membranes’ as a reflection of the high-speed media metropolis and proposes instead an altemative reading - that of deceleration and slowdown. This, he argues. might represent a shift {rom ‘a sociological, or mimetic. phase, related to the world of information processing. to a scientific. philosophical or mystical phase’ Peter Eisenman, Diagram Dianes (New York), 1999. Thave sketched the historical background of this technological revolution in architecture in Technologies of Space/Spaces of Technology’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. vol 58 no 3. September 1999. special issue: Architectural History. 1999/2000. pp 482-6 62 The Diagrams of Architecture10 12 13, 15 16 7 18 19 20 A useful review of these diverse tendencies is to be found in Peter Zeliner, Hybrid Spaces: New Forms in Digital Architecture (New York). 1999. Walter Benjamin, ‘Rigorous Study of Art: On the First Volume of the Kunstwissen-schaftiche Forschungen’ trans. Thomas Y Levin, October, vol 47, Winter 1988, p 69. This is a translation of ‘Walter Benjamin, ‘Strenge Kunstwissenschaft. Zum ersten Bande des Kunstwissenschaftiche Forschungen’, Frankturter Zeitung. 30 July 1933, appearing under Benjamin's pseudonym Detlef Holz; republished in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelie Schriften Frankfurt am Main). 1982, vol 3, pp 363-74. Robin Evans, Translations from Drawang to Building and Other Essays (London), 1997, p 188. The original anicle, ‘Translations from Drawing to Building’. AA Files no 12, Summer 1986, pp 3-18. introduced a subject that was to be developed in brilliant detail in his posthumously published Projective Cast: Architecture and lts Three Geometries (Cambridge, MA), 1995 Indeed itis significant that the only large-scale exhibition dedicated solely to the architectural drawing mounted by a major museum in recent years was the decidedly ambiguous installation of 19th-century drawings from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts al the Museum of Modem Art, New York. Here. the obvious target was Modernism itsel, the ‘Intemational Style" imported by its first architectural curator, Philip Johnson, together with Henry-Russell Hitchcock in 1932, Obviously appealing to a public said to be tired of minimalism and abstraction in architecture and a profession preoccupied with ‘meaning’. ‘signification’ and the communicative power of, architecture to a broader public, this show of ideal projects had, save in its last-minute resentation of Charles Garnier's Paris Opera, litle to do with actual building. For a critical review of this exhibition with regard to the tradition of the Museum of Modem Ant, see William Elis (ed), ‘Forum: The Beaux-Arts Exhibition’. Qppasitions. vol 8. Spring 1977. pp 160-75. See Victor Hugo, ‘Guerre aux demolisseurs'' (1825-32), in Oeuvres completes: Critique, ed Pierre Reynaud (Paris), 1985, p 187; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans Donald Nicholson- Smith (Oxford). 1991, chap 4, ‘From Absolute Space to Abstract Space’ Lefebvre, Production of Space, p 361 Henn Focillon. The Life of Forms in Ar. trans Charles Beecher Hogan and George Rubier (New York), 1992, p 33. See Wemer Szambien, Jean-Nicolas-Lours Durand, 1160-1834. De imitation a fa norme (Paris), 1984. Auguste Choisy, Histoire d l'architecture, 2 vols (Paris), 1899; Le Corbusier republished many of his axonomeirics that displayed in one projection the space and structure of the buildings represented in the journal L'espnt nouveau between 1920 and 1921. and again in Le Corbusier. Vers une architecture (Paris). 1923. Le Corbusier. Vers une architecture, 36. My translation ‘See Paul Frank, Prnciples of Architectural History. The Four Phases of Architectural Style, 1420-1900, trans james F O'Gorman (Cambridge. MA). 1968; and AE Brinckmann. ‘Schematic Plans of Renaissance and Baroque Spatial Groups’, Plastik und Raurn. Als Grundiformen Kunstlenscher Gestaltung (Munich), 1924. Rudolph Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London), 1949. See Reyner Banham. ‘The New Brutalism’, Architectural Review, no 118. 1958, pp 385-61 Colin Rowe, ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, Palladio and Le Corbusier Compared’ Architectural Review. no 101, 1947, pp 101-4. Representations (Berkeley), No 72, Autumn 2000, excerpts and associated notes from pages 1-20, Reproduced by permission of Anthony Vidler. © The Regents of the University of California. 63 Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern RepresentationScientific Management and the Birth of the Functional Diagram Hyungmin Pai In these extracts from his book The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse and Modernity in America, Professor Hyungmin Pai (University of Seoul, Korea) offers an outline history of the architectural diagram in late 19th- and early 20th-century America. Examining the visual and textual evidence for the rise of the Modernist discourse of the architectural diagram, Pai’s analysis of professional architectural journals, interior design and domestic, managerial and industrial publications explores the diagrammatic link between architectural design and social, economic, technological and industrial ideologies of innovation. Contextualised in relation to Taylorism, scientific management and the rise of Modernist functionalism, Pai’s interest lies in charting the effects on architectural design of the instrumental use of space planning, circulation (routing) and the technical diagrams of new building programmes, typologies and technologies. Constructed as an objective, scientific object, the diagram, and diagramming, became the method of choice in the Modernist project to redefine architectural design research and Professional practice as having the technical authority and validity of an expert and specialist science. From the work of Christine Frederick to the time-motion studies and the cyclegraphic diagrams of the Gilbreths, Pai charts the diagram’s role in the functionalisation of the body and its spatial integration with the movements, materials, time and space of architecture. Addressing the relationship of the diagram to the photograph, plan and Parti, he argues that the architectural diagram was developed (beyond Bentham’s Panopticon diagram) as a problematic tool for surveillance, Prediction and control. This diagrammatic engineering and quantification of organisational, social and bodily labour, behaviour and production systems as machinic and, later, as biological systems is interpreted by Pai as a claim for the design of programme as the legitimate locus of expertise, authority and validation for architectural professionals and academics. Highlighting the subjectivity and the possibilities for the expressive Potential, indeterminacies, continuities and discontinuities of today’s discourse of the diagram (as formulated by Christopher Alexander, Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, Greg Lynn, Toyo Ito and Kayuzo Sejima, among others), Pai notes the criticisms, weaknesses and limitations of the diagram that accompanied its evolution into the 21st century. 64 The Diagrams of ArchitectureIn the preceding ... we examined the new promises and demands that emerged in the midst of a fundamental transition in the architectural discipline ... different appeals to style, rationality and social relevance were part of a complex history that witnessed the formation of the discourse of the diagram. As much as this discourse spread and grew along the cracks of the discipline, it was also part of a larger social, economic and technological history ... we examined Taylorism in relation to the evolution of functional planning as a concept antithetical to architectural composition, but we did not deal with what would become its central mode of representation the diagram ... we shall look at the logic, techniques and modes of representation of the diagram: first, as it emerges within scientific management, and second, as it shifts into the realm of architectural discourse. Though the diagram was certainly not the ‘invention’ of scientific management, in its attempt to shift the object of the diagram from nature to society, from machine to the human body, we begin to discover the central issues of the architectural diagram ... Scientific management, perhaps the emblematic social technology of the past century, operated on two basic modem precepts that logically attracted it to the diagram. First of all, scientific management was one of the clearest manifestations of the separation of subject and object, and the subsequent pursuit of their reunification. Based on the authority of scientific knowledge, scientific management assumed that knowledge could be severed from practice and thus could function as the means of controlling practice. In this gap between conception and execution, the diagram emerged as a necessary mechanism for the subject to control its object of knowledge. The diagram is an essentially modem mode of representation ... Its genius lies in the invention of a discursive code that organises reality in order that it may be both visible and usable. Instrumentality, rather than resemblance, is thus the essential criterion in defining a diagram. It is the emblem of the modern crisis of representation ... The second conceptual formation that links scientific management to the birth of the diagram is that of metaphor. For all its professed instrumentality, modernity has continued to be a search for truth ... Though it was exactly the positivist project to do away with all figures of speech, to speak of ‘things as they are’,' for scientific management to apply the tools of engineering towards the control of society it became necessary to construct a set of analogies with natural and mechanical systems ... In scientific management, the production process of a factory, the daily routine of a household, a secretary's office schedule, and the curriculum of a school could each be described as a set of natural Patterns ... The most basic metaphor for scientific management was that of man as machine. As David Noble pointed out, the development of modern management could itself be construed as a ‘shift on the part of engineers from the engineering of things to the engineering of people” ... the engineering principles of materials and equipment were easily applied to human movement and social organisation. As the terms human engineering, human motor and human machine, so pervasive in the literature of 85 Scientific Management and the Birth of the Functional DiagramFigure | ‘Char of Functional Foremanship under Scientific Management From Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, Applied Mouion Study. 1917 Fene Ein] Regaiving & Teste Seredvling | [essere = er | as Figure 2 "Organisation Chart and Functions of Production Departments’. From Arthur G Anderson, Industrial Engineering and Factory Management, 1928. management, implied, the body of the worker was visualised and conceptualised as a machine. This metaphor was shared with industrial psychology and the behaviourism of John B Watson, popularised during the 1910s and 1920s. Not surprisingly, both scientific management and behaviourism shared the goal of the ‘prediction and control of human beings’.’ In order to actualise these cognitive and discursive constructions, a specific set of techniques had to be developed. During the 1910s, the most meticulous techniques of measuring and regulating the body were produced by the husband and wife team of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’ ... Using Taylor's functional divisions, the Gilbreths transcribed his system into the diagram in figure 1 In this diagram the worker was placed at the centre of the converging lines of ‘functional management’, or ‘functional control’. 66 The Diagrams of ArchitectureFigure 3 Diagrammatic plan of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, devised 1787, From John Bowring (ed), ‘The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol 4. 1843. Figure 4 Example of Panopticon building proposed by Bentham. From John Bowring (ed). ‘The Works of jeremy Bentham, vol 4, 1843, The Gilbreth diagram in figure 1 was of course an abstract model. In charting the functional relations of the various production units of a factory, this basic diagram had to be expanded and dispersed into a more multiple organisation such as that in figure 2. Following the basic principle of the Gilbreth diagram, each box in figure 2 symbolised a functional unit rather than a spatial boundary. Furthermore, these diagrams were static models; they did not address the movement of bodies, material and equipment in the factory. Subsequently implementing the Gilbreth diagram into a concrete spatial, temporal and dynamic organisation required a set of institutional mechanisms that maintained its lines of control ... In addition, according to the science of routing, the factory had to be regulated as a predictable and repetitive set of patterns 67 Scientific Management and the Birth of the Functional DiagramThis was, however, an inherently paradoxical rule. In realising the diagram, space, time and movement were not only the obstacles to surveillance but also the means of maintaining functional control. It was a problem not unlike what Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon of the late 18th century was devised to solve.® The Panopticon, as it was drawn out in figure 3, was also a diagram. But unlike figure 1, it was a diagram of space . the Panopticon diagram is function represented as form ... as a diagram that was meant to be built, we may construe the Panopticon as a completely functionalised space, one without dark corners of unobserved movements ... However, for this building to be a spatial transcription of the Gilbreths’ functional diagram, for function and space to coalesce, all the mechanisms of light and darkness, of regulating time and movement, must be perfectly implemented. Only in this panoptic utopia, only when the functionalisation and standardisation of the body are absolute, can there be such a thing as a spatial function ... Though the Panopticon diagram is a spatial marking, it is a utopia, a non-place ... It is in the pursuit of this utopia, this idea in architecture, that the discourse of the diagram was born. From the layout of the plant to the control of the individual worker, its operational principle was to functionalise space and spatialise function. More specifically, the diagram was used as a tool to correlate the unit of Production - the functionalised body of the worker — with a spatial area ... Furthermore, at the scale of each production unit, the body of the individual worker had to be integrated with its immediate material and spatial environment; thus, systematic research into the ergonomic design of tools, equipment and furniture was begun ... Under these Prerogatives, ‘fitness’ in design meant the elimination of unnecessary space and material Surrounding the body ... In what became widely known as their time-motion studies, the Gilbreths took long-exposure single-frame photographs of the movement of a single light point attached to the body ... The principle of cyclegraphic representation could also be extended to the routing diagram ... the inscription of the movements of the body-instrument produced a set of diagrams to be analysed by the management Engineer, whereupon the most efficient movement pattern would be prescribed? .... Pantin Tarlor E | Lieary Figure § “The Thoroughfare’ From Charles F Osbourne, Notes on the Art of House Planning. 1888, 68 The Diagrams of ArchitectureThroughout the development of scientific management, graphic and linear presentation was considered the privileged form of knowledge ... scientific management went one step further to become ‘graphic management’. To represent a set of verbal propositions and numbers into a graph, chart or diagram was to have abstracted from empirical data a set of basic paths of control: ‘Let lines replace figures’ was the axiomatic principle of scientific management.’ Though control of the human body was the ultimate purpose of these diagrams, such control required the regulation of the wayward nature of space, time and movement ... As this body of ideas, techniques and markings moved on to architectural discourse, we shall see whether the functional, visual and institutional rules of scientific management could be maintained, or, if not, how they were transformed. From Scientific Management to Architecture: The Discursive Formation of the Architectural Diagram ... [W]ell before the influence of scientific management, functional diagrams were a common part of 19th-century advice books and manuals on hygiene and domestic matters. The circulation diagram in figure 5, for example, appeared in an advice book titled Notes on the Art of House Planning, published in 1888. ® However, ... this kind of advice book was marginal to the formation of the architectural discipline. Even Christine Frederick's The New Housekeeping, which was immensely popular throughout American society, had little immediate impact on architecture. Though her ideas were not particularly original ... Frederick's illustrations became the most widely recognised examples of the routing diagram. The significance of Frederick's circulation diagram for architecture was more quickly grasped in Europe, particularly by German architects such as Bruno Taut and Alexander Klein. In the politically charged climate of the Weimar Republic, Frederick’s book was translated and enthusiastically endorsed by both the women’s movement and the Modernists in Berlin and Frankfurt.’ During the late 1920s, Klein had developed an extensive system of architectural diagrams in his studies for the Reichsforschungsgesellschaft; these studies first introduced the routing diagram to the American journals’” It was, then, in the 1930s that the new Functionalist diagram emerged as a systematic part of architectural discourse ... While some diagrams can be traced directly to their foots in scientific management, for most others, particularly after the mid-1930s when the diagram became a general part of architectural discourse, it difficult to designate a specific genealogy This transformation is immediately noticeable in the breakdown of the representational basis of scientific management's diagram ... Not surprisingly, in Lillian Gilbreth’s own contribution to kitchen planning, there were no routing diagrams ... Instead, as we see in figure 6, she presented a comparison of two ‘process charts’ of making a coffee cake 69 Scientific Management and the Birth of the Functional DiagramOMOMAL KITCHEN Lar-0UT! 50 PROCIRIED AMD 14) Figure 6 Lilhan Gilbreth, “Application of Motion Study to Kitchen Planning Making a Cake’. From Architectural Record, March 1930. 70 The Diagrams of Architecture Seas ep ate entin two different kitchen layouts. If one were to devise routing diagrams based consistently on cyclegraphic representation, even the simple task of making a cake would tesult in several dozen separate diagrams; or if one reduced the number of diagrams, there would be so many lines in one frame that the image would be illegible. Throughout the 1930s, the diagrams that appeared regularly in the architectural journals met with the same kind of difficulties ... We may then ask how diagrams are constructed in architectural discourse. In order to understand the logic of the architectural diagram, we must first look carefully into the changing discourse of scientific management, as its object moves from the factory to the less regimented environment of the home. One of the most interesting applications of scientific management outside of the factory can be examined in Mary Pattison’s Principles of Domestic Engineering (1915) ... For Pattison, the task of planning the house was a matter of separating and reintegrating the units rooted in the basic needs of its occupants. The plan of the home could therefore be construed as a physiological map of the human body, and routing as the pursuit of a symbiotic relation between human movement and its environment ... Moving on to the architectural diagram — as for example in figure 7, a “functional chart’ of a country house - we discover Pattison’ idea of the ‘logical subdivision by function’ ‘As Pattison had done, this house was divided into basic ‘functional groups’ ... Rather than units of production and movement, they are spatial and physical indications of proximity, accessibility and relative size. And as the functional chart became a codified part of architectural discourse, it began to provide more information on form and space. Architecture’s functional chart was thus more a drawing about space and distance than about function and movement, the kind of notation we have come to call the ‘bubble diagram’ ... the architectural diagram provided the architect with the means to represent space without drawing walls, columns and vaults ... In principle, the diagram should represent concepts and objects external to the building: the movement and activity of its occupants, the flow of air, the angle of sunlight, ie the function’ of the building. These diagrams then play a metaphorical role: the ventilation diagram views the building as a machine for breathing; the sunlight diagram views it as a machine for controlling light and shadow ... Thus, metaphor, so central to the discursive formation of scientific management, also became a pervasive trope of architecture's discourse of the diagram ... At one level, the metaphor functioned as pure ideology, one in which the architectural profession identified its role in the intervention into social institutions. It enabled American architecture to respond to the demands of efficiency and business after the First World War ... It facilitated the depiction of a building as a biological or mechanical system with its own components and rhythms ... these narratives read like expositions of 71 Scientific Management and the Birth of the Functional Diagram